If you’re jetting off for a beachy getaway this summer, you’ll likely need some reading material for those long afternoons spent relaxing in the sun. Instead of blindly choosing a title from your local bookstore’s bestseller table, let the experts—authors—guide you. We asked some of our favorite writers, including Jennifer Weiner, Laura Lippman, and David Sedaris, to share their favorite beach reads, along with the titles they’re stoked to read this summer.

My parents lived in a beach town and for years, I relished returning to their house so I could once again read Kitty Kelly's biography of Elizabeth Taylor, The Last Star. I just loved that book. I don't even remember why. I would read it while eating an excellent BLT and some Utz potato chips and it was sheer bliss. But I also like Anne Tyler's_ Ladder of Years, _which taps into one of the best female fantasies ever, when a woman stalks away from her family on a Delaware beach and starts a new life.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

I'm traveling a lot this summer and heading to the beach for a week right after Memorial Day, so books are very much on my mind. The Fever by Megan Abbott is probably my most anticipated read of the summer. I also have Roxane Gay's_ An Untamed State_ in my TBR pile.

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe is an unsettling beach read, in the sense that it's basically a horror story about sand, but maybe there's something comforting about reading something brilliantly macabre on spookily sun-flooded days.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

I'm most excited about Doretta Lau's short story collection, How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? The title refers to an interview given by the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming; another story centers around a girl who keeps being harassed by text messages from her future self. I love fiction that takes in pop culture and returns it to us resplendent with all its covert sense and nonsense.

My all-time favorite summer read is Susan Isaac's Shining Through. This book has everything you'd want to take to the beach—a plucky, funny secretary who's in love with her too-handsome-to-be-real (and too good to be true) boss. Girl gets boy, but the story's just getting started, as America goes to war. There's adventure, and danger and secret passion and beautiful spies with guns, and…you know what? Just go get a copy now, and thank me later.

Karen Russell, author of Sleep Donation, out exclusively as an ebook now

What is one of your all-time favorite summer reads?

One of my all-time favorite summer reads is The Waves by Virginia Woolf. There is a surrender to a book that can only happen in the dreamy freedom of summer, and Woolf's rhythms roll you under; the spell she casts is completely immersive. It's a great book to read near the actual sea, since the musicality of Woolf's prose and her metaphors for human consciousness arise from the tides.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

There are so many terrific books coming out this summer—I've been raving about Robin Black's Life Drawing, a novel kind of ghost story, in which a past infidelity and the return of the creative impulse disrupts the stability of an artist's marriage. Rivka Galchen's unbelievably great story collection, American Innovations, is fresh-born from FSG and every single story is brilliant. It's the kind of book you immediately want to pass along; I've been tempted to read sentences from it aloud to strangers on buses. And then Kevin Brockmeier, a favorite author of mine, has a fabulous hybridized memoir out, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip, which recounts his seventh grade year in Little Rock, Arkansas. To call it a "memoir" feels somehow false to me, since reading the book actually feels like stepping into a time-travel machine; Brockmeier is a magician on the page.

I love Meg Wolitzer’s _The Interestings _because it’s sprawling and beautifully written and it opens at a summer camp. It’s a truly great novel about friendship, and how it deepens and changes over the years.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

Michael Cunningham’s _The Snow Queen. _Because it’s Michael Cunningham and the audio version is read by Clare Danes. That means you can listen to it while you’re combing your body for ticks and doing other…summer things.

Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings is my favorite summer read even though it is a relatively new book. The novel is so sprawling and ambitious, epic yet intimate, and offers a satisfying look into how a group of friends grow up and grow together and never really grow apart over the course of their lives.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

I cannot wait for The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez, because it's a masterfully told story of two parents trying to do the best for their daughter despite what it costs them. I am also looking forward to Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil, and The Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique because each of these writers have staggering imaginations.****

The Summer Book by Tove Jannson is a perfect short novel. Set on an island, the book features beautifully evocative scenes between a grandmother and granddaughter. It’s so observant about people, and it’ll make you feel good.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

_The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit_by Graham Joyce. His_The Silent Land_is one of my favorite novels, and this one appears to be the summer flipside of that snow-bound book. Besides, I’m an easy mark for fiction set in run-down English resort towns, especially when you throw in a plague of ladybugs.

A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'Nan. It opens with an absolutely gorgeous description of summer heat in a small town in Wisconsin just after the Civil War, and O'Nan’s mastery of language traps you in the story just as the characters will soon be trapped in by quarantine and wildfires.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides. I think he's as a good a narrative nonfiction writer as there is working today. The blend of reporting and storytelling he brings to the table is sensational.

It may not always be summer in Annie Dillard’s collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk–one of the pieces is about Polar explorers—but it is about being able to give oneself entirely to the world of weather and light in a way that I associate with summer.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

I am looking forward to reading Catherine Lacey’s first novel Nobody is Ever Missing. So far I’ve only read a page but I like that page a lot.****

I'll never forget the summer long ago where I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest—a perfect summer project as it's pretty long and involved and requires daily attention. I did a similar thing in my teens with Moby Dick. Summer for me is a good time to get lost in big sprawling experimental works that you can really get lost in. It's not a time for light "beach read" fare, which I find frankly perplexing as a thing to look forward to.

Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Set between New York and Kalimpong, India this book is a fatty, yummy read. I love books that meander and don't mind being big and messy. I want to get lost in a summer read. Because it's also a long book it's perfect for summer traveling (to Kalimpong!) or lazing around (in New York!). It's funny while also being politically relevant. So you get to feel smart and thoughtful as you read, but you also have some fun.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

_Possibilities _ by Kaui Hart Hemmings. I read her first two books about three times each. Though we're from the exact opposite sides of the United States, her Hawaii and my Virgin Islands have a lot in common. I really admire the way she blends the ethnic politics of a place with the intimate personal of the people living there. She makes it clear that where we are from makes great impressions on the decisions we make, even the most private ones. I'm looking forward to seeing what she does with this new novel.

Summer is a good time to revisit old favorites. Especially those swift books of a few hundred pages or so. I like to go back to The Great Gatsby in the summer, and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer_ and William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

Matthew Thomas's We Are Not Ourselves. Also David Bezmozgis's The Betrayers. Here's that novel's first sentence, which is intricate and fine and all the persuasion I need: "A thousand kilometers away, while the next great drama of his life was unfolding and God was banging His gavel to shake the Judaean hills, Baruch Kotler sat in the lobby of a Yalta hotel and watched his young mistress berate the hotel clerk—a pretty blond girl, who endured the assault with a stiff, mulish expression."

The Keep by Jennifer Egan. I don’t think there’s a wilder, more riveting or inventive page-turner out there.

Which new title are you the most excited to read this summer?

I’m dying to read The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. I started it a few months ago and realized instantly that with its iconoclastic heroine, vivid detail and globe-trotting expanse, it was going to be a completely immersive experience that would cause time to dissolve and make me forget who I was. So I decided to save it for an upcoming, brutal plane ride.